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Outlook: Standing Up for My Disabled Village

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Eko Mulyardi

08/12/2015 GMT

Standing Up for My Disabled Village

BBC World Service - Outlook, Standing Up for My Disabled Village

A quarter of Eko Mulyadi's Indonesian home town are born with birth defects.

Eko Mulyadi is from the remote mountainous village of Karangpatihana in Eastern Java, Indonesia. What sets this tiny hamlet apart is the unusually high number of people with mental and physical disabilities - nearly a quarter. That's four times the national average. Life is tough for them, but Eko has taken it upon himself to do something to help. Candida Beveridge went to meet him for Outlook.

How do you hypnotise a shark? Riccardo Sturla Avogadri is an Italian scuba diver who says he's perfected a technique for putting sharks in a trance so that you can get close enough to examine them. 

In the last days of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq, four young men took a considerable risk and formed a heavy metal band called Acrassicauda. All of them are now living in the United States where our reporter Andrew Purcell went to meet two of the members who are still performing regularly with the band - singer Faisal Talal and drummer Marwan Hussein, along with their new guitarist Moe Al-Ansari.

Mark Reay leads a double life - by day he's a fashion photographer and former model living it up in New York, by night his unorthodox lifestyle takes him high above the city's skyline. When he met up with an old friend, the documentary maker Thomas Wirthensohn, Mark ended up telling him about this secret.

(Picture: Eko Mulyardi (left) communicating with his neighbour (right) in Karangpatihan, Indonesia. Credit: Candida Beveridge.)

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